After 25 moves and six states, it’s time to find out

My household moves are hardly Ripley’s worthy, but given the average American moves 11-12 times over their entire lifespan, should I be concerned? According to the Social Security Administration, I have 25 more years to move. Biologically. If the government is right (what are those odds?), I could easily triple the average American. Why do I care?

Friday, we returned home from seeing a new listing. My husband says, “Maybe we should look for a place where it’s always spring or summer.” I look up from my laptop — 17 open tabs, 10 of them houses. Surely he’s not trying to sneak Costa Rica or Belize back on our list of locations. (We decided last year: even paradise is too cold without family a few hours away.)

Then he adds, “I’ve noticed that you start looking toward the end of every winter.”

Swallow. Okay, fair. And fairly accurate. With one 14-month exception in Nebraska, I have sought progressively warmer climes. But I wasn’t convinced that escaping winter is the whole story. (Maybe it is. I am all for finding out.)

What is “Normal”?

Although recent stats are hard to find, the average American moves about 11 times over a lifetime. Average doesn’t define what’s “normal,” it’s just one big mean. Money, mobility, age, education, ethnicity, and the economy (among other things) influence frequency of household moves.

Mover by Choice

There’s no term, none I can find, for people like me who move every few years. For me it’s usually 2–3 years a stretch. But here’s a crucial point: unlike millions of Americans, I have almost always chosen to move.

Counting all my household moves as an adult, 90% of them were based on my decision to move. Urban, poor Americans also move — driven by poor housing conditions, unresponsive landlords and other subsidized housing issues. One study found that about 70 percent of many relocation “decisions” among the poor are not decisions at all, but rather reactions to outside forces.

Also, Not a Serial Mover

Besides choice, another distinction is that people who move more than average are not necessarily serial movers. Yep, it’s a thing.

New York Times is where I first saw the term serial movers: “Those who eagerly hop back on the open-house circuit even before the aroma of fresh paint and polyurethane begins to fade — that is, if they ever stopped looking in the first place.”

Despite the obvious connotation of the word serial and my desire not to have a moving-related psychosis, I don’t believe I am a serial mover. For one thing, I don’t continue looking after the closing. I do like to paint, and unless ceiling height poses safety issues, I do my own interior painting (and lawn mowing).

Serial movers seem motivated by everything from a desire for exploration, to the perpetuation of habit born in childhood, to a hunger for drama and excitement, to a fondness for extreme housekeeping. And these days, such appetites are stoked by a smorgasbord of aggressively marketed new buildings engaging in a constant battle of one-upmanship.

Desire for exploration: Check. That’s it. No childhood habit, no desire for drama beyond that which my three (now grown) daughters have already gifted, and certainly, above all, zero fondness for extreme housekeeping. (What is extreme housekeeping? Isn’t housekeeping unpleasant enough?) As for the one-upmanship, I care to impress as much as I’m an extreme housekeeper.

So How Much More Crazier Am I ?

Between birth and before moving into a shared dorm room, I lived in two places (actually, three: an apartment until I was months old, but have no memory of it). So, I don’t fit the army brat profile. I’m not replaying my formative years.

Photo for reuse: Wikimedia Commons

My first choice was to go to college; I was assigned to live in the tallest dormitory in the world. Given freshmen and sophomores had to live in a dorm, I wanted to try every conceivable type of room: After the double with Mary, I sought a single — which I learned made me less happy — and then a triple with Mary and Chris.

My desire to move within constraints is probably not inconsequential. It tells me that regardless of where I have to be, I want to explore all the possibilities.

Openness to Change

I like change. I get antsy or bored with too much certainty. When I taught trait-based leadership I’d take the Big Five Personality assessment with my students and plot our scores so we could see ranges and means. I was usually the highest data point at 95% on openness to experience. When another student scored similarly, I was able to guess: they were the one that loved to color outside the lines, suggest new colors, redraw the lines.

I can’t find any research on propensity to move and personality traits, so I’m spit-balling an educated hunch. The main question remains: is there a point at which moving reflects more than one or two dimensions of a “normal” personality? When might moving become a compulsion or something worse?

Experts Say:

When it comes to a psychological profile of movers, clinical psychologist Nancy J. Crown says that cookie-cutter explanations don’t exist:

It would always have to be understood within the context of the particular person and their unique history. So you really couldn’t say that moving a lot means the same thing for everyone.

(Whew.) Yet, as Crown warns against overpathologizing frequent moving behavior, she also says:

There are some people who — either because of a lack of sense of who they are, or some feeling of inadequacy — may want to redo themselves in one way or another again and again. Something new is like anything is possible — you can sort of imagine yourself to be the person that you’d like to be.

Do I feel inadequate? No. Do I really know who I am and what I want to be? No. I’ve wanted to be everything from a blue fairy princess to a union organizer, a social scientist to Joan Didion. This year it’s Didion.

And I’m totally on board with anything is possible.

Finally, Crown adds that excessive moving could signal a fear of commitment and a consequent fear of closing off opportunities. Or, like procrastination, it can be a way to avoid failure.

Aha. Am I on to something? A fear of commitment to an imperfect place that follows me wherever I go? Or a fear of missing out on a place that’s out there… waiting for me?

A place to write in a sunny, warm, simple but comfortable, secluded but accessible, inexpensive yet quality-built cottage where tiny goats, cats and dogs frolic with or without our grandchildren on a few acres. Something in between Thoreau’s rustic single-room at Walden Pond and the airy Spanish Colonial of the Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West. A place where I’ll never feel depressed or lacking, old or tired, worried or worn.

Or am I avoiding failure (or the chance of success)? Am I using my Zillow hour each day to inadvertently rob myself of writing time, to put off being as productive as possible in a perfectly imperfect house that is more than good enough for the next 25 years?

I’m momentarily calmed and then, just the thought of things being close to perfect reminds me of Ricky Bobby’s daddy Reese in Talladega Nights:

Yep, I guess things are just about perfect… it’s making me feel kind of itchy.